Catching the heartbeat of the data management community: perspectives on exciting and controversial topics, from and for the ACM SIGMOD community.
Dear members of the SIGMOD/PODS Community: On January 16 (Martin-Luther-King Day in the USA), the SIGMOD Executive Committee decided to move the ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2017 conference out of North Carolina to a new, still undecided location. The decision was made unanimously by the Committee following…
Read more…Self-driving cars, ride-sharing service (e.g., Uber and Lyft), and Pokemon Go are just three examples of recent disruptive applications that gained huge market share and publicity. It is expected that each self-driving car will generate 2 PB of data per year, with 10 Million of such cars by 2020.…
Read more…In the 21st century, our everyday lives are shaped by what machines tell us to do. Big data and their application to economy, policy, and our social life act as behavioral equalizers. And this they do under the assumption of optimization in both subtle and open ways. In fact, they are pushing…
Read more…Some months ago, I found an exciting piece of news on the Web: a top manager proclaimed [1]: “If the most important thing you offer is data, you are in trouble. (….) Algorithms is where the real value lies. Algorithms define action.” How interesting! It seems to suggest that everybody, including…
Read more…(This blog post is an extended version of an October 12, 2015 Le Monde op-ed article (in French)) Our society is increasingly relying on algorithms in all aspects of its operation. We trust algorithms not only to help carry out routine tasks, such as accounting and automatic manufacturing, but also…
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I recently celebrated my 10th anniversary at Google and decided to take the opportunity to share some of my reflections on the past decade. Prior to joining Google, I was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where I founded the…
Read more…A Federated DBMS is a middleware offering that runs on top of (perhaps several) local DBMSs and presents a seamless interface to disparate systems with (perhaps) independently constructed DBMS schemas. Systems in this category include R*, Ingres*, Garlic, IBM’s Information Integrator, and several…
Read more…We keep designing new data systems over and over again. We ask two questions in this post: 1) Is this sustainable in the long term? 2) Can we make this process faster? The need for new data system designs “Big data” may be mostly a marketing term as opposed to a research one but it...
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With the growing complexity of the Web, users often find themselves overwhelmed by the mass of choices available. For example, shopping for DVDs or clothes online becomes more and more difficult, as the variety of offers increases rapidly and gets unmanageable. To facilitate users in their…
Read more…Big Data, and its 4 Vs – volume, velocity, variety, and veracity – have been at the forefront of societal, scientific and engineering discourse. Arguably the most important 5th V, value, is not talked about as much. How can we make sure that our data is not just big, but also valuable? WebDB…
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